Tomorrow is the big Windows 8 / Surface Launch, so I will continue on with the Microsoft vs. Google vs. Apple thinking from yesterday.
Henry Ford is credited with the famous line: "I know that fifty percent of my advertising is wasted, I just don't know which half." I wrote a post about this a few years back and also dug into the idea that Google is trading analog dollars for digital dimes. Which turns out to be easier for Google, the company that gets the dimes, than for other advertising providers that are losing the dollars. The advertising dime migration is fueling a whole bunch of creative destruction in the advertising business.
It is going to get much worse. Every day advertising gets more measurable and it might just turn out that the non productive half of the advertising business is in fact bigger than half. In an anemic growth environment, or worse yet another recession, companies might just find a better use for a big part of the $600B presently spent on advertising.
If so, what happens to all of the technology companies that have placed their bets on making advertisers their customers? What if the digital dimes get traded for mobile advert pennies? Google was perfectly happy getting new revenue away from the newspapers -- so they did not care that their prices were a tenth of the market. But if Google has to trade its own dimes of revenue for pennies -- it is going to hurt.
All the while Microsoft soldiers on making businesses productive.